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Saturday, May 5

5th May - Weekender: Off-Topics

Watch out, Bruce Lee

Here are some
off-topic articles from mostly the past week. Unless something crazy happens
during the weekend, this is my final post for the week, next update on Monday
morning. You can get update notifications by following MoreLiver on Twitter or Facebook. Contact me with any questions or
suggestions!

The
persecution of Jews during WWII is one of the darkest and most puzzling
chapters of recent history. This column asks how economics can help our
understanding, particularly of how people’s attitudes to Jews have changed over
time. It argues that ‘cultural economics’ shows that there is more to
understanding how people behave than looking at their incentives.

In its annual survey out on Thursday (3 May),
the council's European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said
welfare cuts and shrinking job opportunities are factors behind the recent rise
in intolerance and violence directed at immigrants and other vulnerable
minorities.

FiveBooks Interviews: Jules Evans on Ancient
Philosophy for Modern Life – The
Browser

The philosophy author explores lessons of the
ancients relevant to our globalised, information age – by way of cognitive
behavioural therapy, and government measures of happiness

Ever since the invention of farming, productive
adults tend to specialize in some economic activity. People are plastic, they
can become many different kind of experts, but there's a lot of domain specific
knowledge involved in anything so you need to choose a parochial area of
expertise at some point.

The ideal memorial is written from distance, a
generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning
accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam
Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York,
which is now gone, as is he.

Adam Yauch, a founding member of pioneering
hip-hop group the Beastie Boys who captivated fans with their brash style in
early hits like "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," died on Friday
after a battle with cancer. He was 47.

In losing Adam Yauch — the musician and
lyricist known to most as MCA — music has lost an icon, yes. But beyond that,
for those who love what’s become known as “remix culture,” a musical movement
is now minus one of its founding fathers.

In a significant step forward for all-optical
computing, physicists build a silicon transistor that works with pure light

Machine Politics: The man who started the
hacker wars – The
New Yorker

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the
iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a
seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile
subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his
existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.

The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s
Changing the Rules of Business – Wired

Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially
focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are
diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior
compared against the mass of users on the standard site.

On April 30th Google Wave ceased to exist… The
flop could either be locked away in its code vault, the company trying hard to
forget about all the money and effort that went into it. Or it could be given
away in the hope that someone could do something useful with it.

Cary and Michael Huang have updated their
zoomable scale of everything (first seen in 2010). The graphics are nicer and
smoother, they’ve replaced the annotations with a scale in the corner, and
everything can be clicked on for popup detail.

A new theory might help researchers double the
power of fusion reactors.

MONEY

The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to
a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy – NYT

Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to
have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years
writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the
superrich’s role in our society.

We all know the feeling of mindlessness. You
get it when you drive the same roads as usual and get out at the end not
remembering anything about the journey, or when you eat a meal without tasting
it, or leave a meeting without the faintest idea what just happened. Yet to
everyone around us we’ve behaved just the same way we always do.

Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have
essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the
human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs
that our evolution may be accelerating.

Marge Profit was a maverick thinker in
evolutionary biology, possibly a genius, but never settled down in academia.
Won a MacArthur grant, published three landmark papers while still in her
thirties—and then vanished, in 2004

Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance
the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are
inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He
uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional
criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a
criminal's body function as lines on a professional résumé, why inmates resort
to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters
are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies.